Schlagwort: DOAJ

On August 1, 2017, 9,621 journals were listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).Only 32 publishers published more than 20 of these journals and thus have a quantitatively significant influence on Open Access. PLOS can not be found among them, but still has influence – more qualitative than quantitative.

These 32 publishers publish 2,950 journals, which are 31% of all journals listed in the DOAJ.

At this date, the DOAJ reported 7,474 publishers, thus 0.43% of all DOAJ-listed publishers produced 31% of the journals.

For more information please see the data deposited on Zenodo:Herb, U. (2017, August 2). Publishers of journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). http://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.838022

Just as 2015 and 2014 I produced an Open Access Heatmap using data provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). I calculated the number of Open Access Journals per country as listed by the DOAJ (this quite trivial data can be downloaded as a CSV file here, it was retrieved from the DOAJ yesterday). Using this CSV file with the online service CartoDB I produced the following heatmap visualizing the number of Open Access Journals per country. Please note that the map is generated by CartoDB and that CartoDB’s terms of use and terms of service apply. Click on a country to see how many Open Access Journals are published there. The countries publishing most of the Open Access Journals listed in the DOAJ are: Brazil (873), the United Kingdom (754) and the United States of America (675). Please feel free to use the CSV file and mash it up with other data just as Christian Heise did with the data from 2015.

Please note that the map has only illustrative value and of course it is obvious that it needs to be contextualized with other information to allow profound conclusions. Anyone who wants to have more detailled or granualar information is invited to take the data available on the web and to build heatmaps that visualize for instance the number of Open Access articles published per country. Of course it may also be useful to take other indicators into account as consumer price index, expenditures for research or the number of scientists.

Although I am very well aware of all these limitations of the heatmap published here unfortunatley I do not have the time to collect the data and build these maps – it is up to the rest of the Open Access community to do so if it thinks better maps are needed.

Just like last summer I produced an Open Access Heatmap using data provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). I calculated the number of Open Access Journals per country as listed by the DOAJ (this quite trivial data can be downloaded as a CSV file here). Using this CSV file with the online service CartoDB I produced the following heatmap visualizing the number of Open Access Journals per country. Please note that the map is generated by CartoDB and that CartoDB’s terms of use and terms of service apply. Click on a country to see how many Open Access Journals are published there.

Last week (at the 22nd of August) I downloaded data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and calculated the number of Open Access Journals per country as listed by the DOAJ (this quite trivial data can be downloaded as a CSV file here). Using this CSV file with the online service CartoDB I produced this heatmap visualizing the number of Open Access Journals per country. Please note that the map is generated by CartoDB and that CartoDB’s terms of use and terms of service apply. Click on a country to see how many Open Access Journals are published there.

In June 2014 I analysed the data of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) to find out to what extent Open Access Journals in Sociology (as listed by the DOAJ) charge their authors with publication fees (or article processing charges APCs). A CSV-file offered for download by the DOAJ did not contain any information on APCs, in fact the whole APC-column was empty, so I gathered the information manually from the DOAJ’s search interface. Unfortunately the DOAJ’s information on sociological journals using APCs was too a large degree wrong.

On the eleventh of June the DOAJ listed109sociologyjournals. In eleven cases the information on APCs was wrong:

nine were labeled as APC-based although they did not use APCs

one was labeled as using APCs conditionally, but in fact it charged every article published

one was charging its authors although the DOAJ listed it as not using APCs

This means that for this subset of journals the information on publication charges was wrong in more than 10 % of all journals. Focusing on the eleven journals that – according to the DOAJ – use (always or conditionally) APCs the situation is even worse: 10 of these journals (90,9 %) are categorized wrongly.

In fact only three out of these 109 journals (2,75 %) charge their authors: Sociology Mind (ISSN 2160-083X) charges 700 US-$ per article (plus 50 US-$ for each additional page). Studies of Sociology of Science (ISSN 1923-0176) charges 300 US-$ per article and Intersticios (ISSN 1887-3898) charges beween 10 and 20 € per article (depending on the number of pages). None of these APC-based journals has a journal impact factor assigned (according to the Journal Citation Reports Edition 2012). Instead four of the other journals (not using APCs) have an impact factor assigned.

Compared to other disciplines APCs are a rare phenomenon in Sociology (as mentioned 2,75 % of the journals know publication fees): Solomon & Björk (2012) report a portion of 26 % of Open Access journals charging their authors, whereas Shieber (2009) reports 23,14 %. Shieber seems to have trusted in the data offered by the DOAJ, therefore his numbers might potentially be biased. Solomon & Björk used a randomized sample of journals and checked for each journal within the sample the information on APCs, so their results are very trustworthy. Please not: This comment intends not to malign Shiebers excellent work.

Just another by-product of my dissertation thesis on Open Science in the Social Sciences: Last saturday (June 14, 2014) I had a look at the ten countries that publish the most Open Access journals and the share of journals charging their authors with article processing charges (APCs) per country. I used the Directory of Open Access Journals DOAJ to gather the information needed and faced some problems: Of course I would have prefered to use the CSV-file offered by the DOAJ, the DOAJ homepage promises that the „csv file is updated every 30 minutes“ – in fact it is about five weeks old and was obviously generated at May 7th, that is at least what the file’s name indicates: doaj_20140507_1330_utf8.csv. Accordingly the information within the CSV file was not up to date, it contained information on 9.709 journals. However the DOAJ website told me that it lists 9.834 journals.

Moreover the CSV file was not usable for my purpose because it did contain a column named Publication Fee, but this column did not contain any information, in fact it was totally empty. So I had to compile the information on Open Access journals per country and the occurence of publication fees by using the DOAJ web interface. The following table gives an impression about the ten countries publishing the largest numbers of Open Access journals. Thequeryvia the web interfaceshoweda difference betweenthe total number ofjournalsper country andthe sum ofjournalsthat eitherraised noAPCs, that did chargeAPCsordid charge them conditionally. This differencewasinterpreted as the numberofmissing values. As we see most of the journals are published in the USA, Brazil (probably mainly via the publication network SciELO) and the UK.

Country

Number of journals

Missing Values

No information available

Conditional charges (number of journals)

Conditional charges (percentage)

No charges(number of journals)

No charges(percentage)

Has charges(number of journals)

Has charges(percentage)

USA

1.206

6

33

47

3,90%

632

52,40%

488

40,46%

Brazil

927

21

5

14

1,51%

845

91,15%

42

4,53%

UK

615

4

4

15

2,44%

200

32,52%

392

63,74%

India

593

3

3

78

13,15%

254

42,83%

255

43,00%

Spain

526

10

4

12

2,28%

480

91,25%

20

3,80%

Egypt

461

21

0

0

0,00%

41

8,89%

399

86,55%

Germany

338

5

4

4

1,18%

226

66,86%

99

29,29%

Romania

299

2

0

6

2,01%

264

88,29%

27

9,03%

Italy

292

5

2

6

2,05%

251

85,96%

28

9,59%

Islamic Republic of Iran

264

8

0

37

14,02%

193

73,11%

26

9,85%

Resorting the table by the share of journals charging their authors per country gives us some insight in the prevalence of an APC based business modell per country:

Country

Number of journals

Missing Values

No information available

Conditional charges (number of journals)

Conditional charges (percentage)

No charges(number of journals)

No Charges(percentage)

Has Charges(number of journals)

Has charges(percentage)

Egypt

461

21

0

0

0,00%

41

8,89%

399

86,55%

UK

615

4

4

15

2,44%

200

32,52%

392

63,74%

India

593

3

3

78

13,15%

254

42,83%

255

43,00%

USA

1.206

6

33

47

3,90%

632

52,40%

488

40,46%

Germany

338

5

4

4

1,18%

226

66,86%

99

29,29%

Islamic Republic of Iran

264

8

0

37

14,02%

193

73,11%

26

9,85%

Italy

292

5

2

6

2,05%

251

85,96%

28

9,59%

Romania

299

2

0

6

2,01%

264

88,29%

27

9,03%

Brazil

927

21

5

14

1,51%

845

91,15%

42

4,53%

Spain

526

10

4

12

2,28%

480

91,25%

20

3,80%

This chart makes the differences between the countries even more distinctive:

Surprisingly Egypt leads this ranking with 86,55% of its Open Access journals charging authors, followed by the UK (presumably reaching this position because of the large number of Open Access journals published by the UK based publisher BioMed Central), India (traditionally suspected to be the country of origin of many predatory Open Access Publishers, that use APCs as an revenue modell but that do not guarantee the quality control of their publications) and the USA. The USA and the UK have always been known to be the home countries of well-known commercial publishing houses and it might be that they are also the home country of many commercial Open Access Publishers. Right away I do not have a explanation for Egypt’s ranking – except the unfounded (and to some extent chauvinstic) idea that the large amount of APC-based journals might hint at a prevalence of predatory publishing, but I emphasize that I do have any evidence for that insinuation.

Both data and chart are available under an open license, please cite this information as:

Update: Lambert Heller and Richard Poynder noted in two comments that the high numbers of Open Access journals from Egypt are caused by the activities of the Open Access publisher Hindawi – and of course they are absolutely right. So thanks a lot for that hint Lambert and Richard!

Ulrich Herb: @Richard: Great idea! Of course it would be some (or even a lot of) work. To my mind the data would best be gathered manually or via the journals OAI interfaces (if they have one). One could use the DOAJ as a starting point, in a second step one should identfy the correspondings authors affiliation. If we would also like to know the money spend (and not only the number of articles published under an APC modell), it would be necessary to check the APC conditions on the publishers homepages. You would also need to consider whether the information provided by the DOAJ whether a journal charges APCs are correct. For Sociology I found an incredibly high share of false postives (journals that in fact did not charge their authors, but that – according to the DOAJ’s information – used APCs).

Richard Poynder: A good candidate for a crowdsourcing project perhaps?

Ulrich Herb: Absolutely! The crowd would just strictly have to take heed of the design of the study, but I guess that would be a minor problem.

Wow!ter: I would have expected Nigeria in this graph as well. What would be their position on the graphs?

Ulrich Herb: Dear wow!ter, Nigeria is missing because (according to the DOAJ) it only publishes 38 Open Acceess journals, correction: the DOAJ indexes only 38 Open Access journals from Nigeria that is position 47 in a ranking of the countries with the highest output of Open Access Journals. 29 of these Nigerian journals are charging their authors, 3 are charging them conditionally and 6 that don’t use publication fees. So the share of journals using fees is 76,31%.That means Nigeria would hold position two in table two, but it must be noted that we do not know the shares of APC based journals in the other countries on positions 11 to 46 in a ranking of the countries with the highest output of Open Access Journals.

Dom Mitchell: Hello there, I just wanted to correct a small thing here: „Nigeria is missing because (according to the DOAJ) it only publishes 38 Open Access journals,“ Actually, DOAJ only indexes 38 Open Access journals from Nigeria. We are sure that there are many others but they have either never applied to be part of DOAJ, or they were rejected from DOAJ because they didn’t meet the requirements. I am certain that is what you meant but I just wanted to make sure that was clear for wow!ter. Many thanks, Dom